Latest Blog Posts

by Marshall Sandoval

Last year, Edge published an article titled “How Clones, Fear, Sanitisation and Free-to-Play Soured Apple’s iOS Gaming Revolution”. With the exception of a few bright spots, the article painted the App Store as a place that indie games go to die and fretted that clones and free-to-play titles were choking off any hope of innovation on the platform. Less than a year later, innovative games are still arriving for iPhone and iPad. Are things still heading the wrong way or have rumors of the death of iOS gaming been greatly exaggerated?

There is little doubt that problems on the app store persist, but the iOS ecosystem is making progress. A case could be made that 2014 was the platform’s strongest year ever from a creative standpoint. “I’d say there are more good games on iOS than there ever have been,” says Matt Myer, one of the designers of Ephemerid: A Musical Adventure. Evidence of the burgeoning creativity in the mobile space comes in part from the multiple Independent Games Festival award nominations given to mobile games this year.

The smoke has settled and the dust has cleared from what many have deemed a by-the-book E3 that had little highs and many lows, including Nintendo’s “reveal” of their new system, the Wii U. I recently had a chance to play many of the demos that were available at E3, and while I was anxious to try out Nintendo’s new console, I was more interested to see if all of the Internet damnation was viable or if it was just more jaded remarks from a collective community that never seems content. Critics have already extensively broken down each gameplay scenario from each of the demos shown at E3, so instead of regurgitating the same information from the quick slices I was able to play I will instead be delving more into the new interactive scenarios thT Nintendo’s most important asset—their new controller—could create and also tell you why it’s okay to finally forgive the Big N.

Counter Strike version 1.3 was the first video game that I played online in any capacity. In my high school years, I was a Nintendo devotee, which afforded the bare minimum of online gaming experiences. Though I owned Phantasy Star Online: Episodes I & II for the Nintendo Gamecube, the $10-a-month charge to play online was too steep for my part-time, $7 an hour job. So when a friend told me to buy Half-Life in order to play alongside him and millions of others in Counter Strike for free, I was sold.

To this day, I have never played more than 30 minutes of the original Half-Life. After settling into the competitive, online playing field of Counter Strike, I found all other functions of the game superfluous. But Counter Strike is unique, and not only because it revolutionized the first-person shooter. It was a successful online multiplayer experience ostensibly without a single-player accompaniment.

by Cat Goodfellow

A rather unpleasant squirrel from Allods Online (Nival Interactive, 2011)

You’d be forgiven for thinking that Eastern Europe doesn’t produce much interesting in the way of games. We don’t hear a great deal about them in the West. Even in Europe, games from Russia and its close neighbors don’t enjoy a great deal of distribution and advertising. It’s not all grey and colorless over there, though. The past few years have seen some genuinely engaging titles surfacing from a swamp of mediocrity, and recent legislation offering Russian game companies government subsidies suggests that there might be more where those came from. With that in mind, here are a handful of the most promising Eastern European games around right now. My only caveats: that they be developed in Eastern Europe, playable in English, and available with reasonable ease.

There have been two absolutely amazing MMO stories coming down the blog pipeline and both deserve mentioning.

The first is Jim Rossignol’s four part series over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun about his five year experiences with EVE Online. It chronicles the formation of a small raiding corporation called The State and their wanderings across the massive universe of EVE. If you’re unfamiliar with the game, it’s a startlingly open game where players form enormous corporations and alliances. Resources must be mined, transported, and developed at player created stations. The need to ferry supplies and control markets, all controlled by players, make his stories of pirating and raiding groups fascinating both as a social experiment and purely because of how complex these online games are becoming. Fondly remembering a long conflict with another corporation Rossignol writes, “The few months in which we fought, toe to toe, is something I’d love to be able to recreate or recapture, but I know it’s lost. A singularity in the history of gaming. It was so valuable: a time when the kind of game I’d always dreamed of had come to pass: carving out our niche in a living universe, protecting the weak, working as a team to make money and bring down enemies.”

From Ultima Online

The second is a collection of musings by a former GameMater or GM of the now defunct Ultima Online. The game was one of the first graphically depicted MMO games and drew heavily on MUDs and previous Ultima games for its design. What made it unique was what a hostile and wild place the game became when contrasted to modern MMO’s. If someone unprepared stepped outside of town, thugs would descend on them immediately. The game was ridiculously unbalanced as well, allowing for master players to basically dominate the scene. Being a GM in such a culture, which resembled Hobbes’s state of nature more than a civil online game, allowed one called Backslash to collect a long list of stories. So many that he’s posted three essays so far with hopefully more to come. You can check the first post out here. He comments, “As an ex-professional deus ex machina, I have a brain full of these stories that bubble up unbidden in my memory from time to time. I thought you might enjoy if I shared a few of the more interesting stories I took part in.”